Pages

28 February, 2011

Well ok no, there will be no fighting, no nastiness, just some nice pictures of pretty things and everyone is friends and there are fluffy bunnies and icecreams with cherries on top. Really.

Seriously though, I have a couple of the more popular Scandinavian craft books at the moment, and since I'm always unsure with books like this which one might appeal to me the most I thought I'd do a quick side-by-side comparison in case anyone else out there is wondering too!

I bought Scandinavian Needlecraft by Clare Youngs for myself for Christmas and love it. It's focused on felt, either commercially produced or felted old sweaters etc. (technically I suppose that would be felted and fulled respectively) and lots of simple hand embroidery. The sections are Bags, Gifts and Decorations (Xmas stuff mostly), Kitchen, Clothes and Accessories and Soft Furnishings.

Scandinavian Stitches by Kajsa Wikman is out from the library and while it's really very nice it's not quite exactly where I'm at at the moment. Having said that I found plenty of projects to show you and I'm quite sure I'll return to it at some point! The projects focus more on fabrics, stuffed items and free-motion stitching done on the machine. That might be part of my reluctance with this book, my machine doesn't do it well and I don't trust that I'd do a good job as some of it requires precision work. The book sections are done by season Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Yule. One thing I will definitely be doing are these little Tomte stuffies

So there you go, both great books with a wide range of projects and pretty much no overlap at all if you're thinking about getting both!